Detroit

Under the banner of Detroit Will Breathe, the city’s Black Lives Matter activists have formed a cohesive and lasting local political force.

A state investigation found that Detroit police officers fabricated evidence that helped convict a 14-year-old boy. A judge threw out his conviction after he spent nine years in prison, but the officers are still on the job and haven’t been flagged as unreliable to testify in court.

President Trump and the DOJ are funding federal policing programs in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore, but advocates say they’re unnecessary, harmful, and ineffective.

Lawyers and activists are calling on prosecutor Kym Worthy to dismiss charges against those who have been arrested. As of July 29, 451 Detroiters had been arrested for violating Michigan’s concealed carry law, an increase of 190 percent compared to July 2019.

As COVID-19 deaths mount in Michigan prisons, the review of questionable convictions has slowed, leaving prisoners vulnerable to the disease.

Public health recommendations aren’t easy to follow for the incarcerated, unhoused, or the thousands who’ve been subjected to water shutoffs in recent years.

Experts say playing up the risk of sex trafficking fuels anxiety and criminalization.

Jamal Segars and his friend Brian Minner were shot near the Detroit airport in 2004. Thelonious “Shaun” Searcy became the prime suspect, and investigator theorized he had meant to kill someone else and shot Segars and Minner by mistake. Officers from the scene were unable to identify Searcy, but four other random eye-witnesses did. Searcy presented eight […]

In 1996, a 12-year-old girl named Christina Brown was found dead in a Detroit apartment. She had been beaten to death with a toilet tank lid; she’d also been stabbed. Lamarr Monson — who had been living with and dealing drugs with Brown thinking she was older — came home and found her dead. He called for the neighbors to […]

Ledura Watkins spent 41 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. And the only evidence prosecutors had against Watkins in the early 1970’s was a single hair.